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Online retailers are geared up to handle the festive season rush spanning Dussehra, Diwali, Christmas and New Year. Many of them have stepped up their workforce, while others have tied up with logistics companies to speed things up. Plus, plenty of offers and discounts have been lined up to make the most of the festive time.

Expecting an upsurge of 250 per cent in traffic, ‘Ferns n Petals’, is planning to hire manpower for a week to handle the additional orders. It is also making its present workforce multi-task to keep up with the flood of queries and orders.

“As the online transactions are very high, all employees have got down on the floor to take calls and orders, irrespective of the job profiles”, said, Rakesh Nautiyal, assistant general manager, ferns n petals, e-commerce. Even the call centre head and the service head are taking calls to cater to the increase in demand, Nautiyal pointed out.

While Naaptol.com has strengthened its current workforce to accommodate around 20 per cent growth in sales during the festive season, Yebhi.com is working to augment manpower by 50 per cent to cater to the swell in orders.

“For festive season, we are planning to hire a special team that would handle addition in queries from customers,” said Manmohan Agarwal, spokesperson of yebhi.com, a franchise portal of BigshoeBazaar. Yebhi has doubled the call centre strength to 800 people. Naaptol.com has tied up with the logistics firms to ramp up the workforce in the logistics department as the orders go up during October, November and December.

“We ensure with each of our logistics partners that their resources are in line, as the orders go up so that there is no delay in deliveries to our customers”, said Sandeep Komaravelley, marketing head, Snapdeal.com. Snapdeal.com is expecting the sales to almost double this season. ‘Ferns n Petals’ has an interesting range of products lined up for the shoppers, such as Cracker Hampers and Champagne Diwali hampers.

“For buyers who prefer eco-friendly products, we have various plants that one can gift on the festive occasion”, said Nautiyal. We have introduced ‘puja thali’ as well, which is gaining pace with the buyers, he added.

“We have launched contest on the social networking site Facebook for the festive season. We will give out 3G tablets, watches and gift vouchers”, said Sachin Singhal, business head , Ecommerce, Naaptol.

“Our offers on snapdeal.com would hit the floor in the first week of October, and it will crescendo by Diwali”, said Komaravelley. Online retail market is estimated at Rs 2,000 crore in India, according to a recent industry report. This is a fraction of the total retail industry size of around Rs 16,00,000 crore.